Teresita Fernandez poses in her studio Sep. 18, 2005 in New York. Photo by Zack Seckler.

Teresita Fernandez poses in her studio Sep. 18, 2005 in New York. Photo by Zack Seckler.

Photo: ZACK SECKLER

A natural look above and below

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A series of transparent tubes, in shades of yellow, orange, black and gray, undulates overhead through the so-called "tall" gallery at MASS MoCA. True, that could describe almost any gallery at this museum known for its cavernous exhibition spaces, but this is the one just inside the entrance that's three stories high and 130 feet long. The tubes make up "Black Sun," the creation of Teresita Fernandez, who has taken over four of the main galleries here with installations and large-scale paintings.

"Black Sun" takes advantage of the museum's natural light, as the suspended polycarbonate tubes seem to change hues slightly as the outdoor light changes. The tubes create a landscape of horizontal shadows, some darker than others, across the back wall, while on the side walls, the shadows fall down in rays. From the second and third floors, the tubes are less like a cloud formation and more like a rolling landscape or a glowing river stretching across the gallery. This view allows the viewer to take in the entire sculpture at once, rather than craning one's neck, and it's an impressive sight.

In the adjacent central gallery, Fernandez has installed a site-specific work that consists of small lumps of raw, mined graphite dotting the walls. In "Sfumato (Epic)," each has a smear of drawn graphite above and below, as if weather had caused it to run down the wall. These pieces of graphite are clustered together in some places and far apart in others, as they seem to move across the wall in a pattern similar to the one created by the tubes in "Black Sun" — they rise and fall and spread. The installation reflects Fernandez's interest in scale shifts and the way something vast can be intimate, and vice versa. Up close, patterns emerge that, from far away, may be lost as they become part of a larger pattern.

This idea is further investigated in her third large installation, "Lunar (Theatre)," another piece that utilizes the vast floor space and natural light available at the museum. Spread across 800 square feet is a low, stepped, stage-like structure covered in reflective gold material with small glass beads clustered on top. The beads look like sand being pushed by the waves on a beach. The reflection of the windows in the gold material is broken up by the pattern of the beads, which, though translucent, become opaque when clustered together.

The exhibition is filled out with paintings, for which Fernandez has combined gold chrome and India ink to create dramatic, foreboding landscapes, some of which border on abstraction. The reflective gold brings both the viewer and the architecture of the room into the landscape, but the massive black areas swallow up everything. In most of these, the broad areas of black are the land, with the golden sky broken up by black rain. In "Golden (Obsidian Sky)," that's reversed with a heavy black sky descending down onto a field of gold and black that could be either water or land. The heavy, static nature of these works contrasts nicely with the movement of the installations, providing another way of thinking about the title "As Above So Below," which refers to the idea that all actions correlate and that the micro is the same as the macro.

The ethereal nature of the exhibit also complements the Izhar Patkin exhibit in the largest gallery. That beautifully lyrical show closes on Sept. 1, so August is the month to visit MASS MoCA while all galleries are filled and open.